After 19 amazing years at Iowa State University Dept. of Computer Science,I will be moving to Tulane University as the next Dean of the School of Science and Engineering. My family are I are excited about our life in the vibrant city of New Orleans.

Dr. Ali Ghanbari and I have received the Distinguished Paper Award at the 38th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2023) for our paper titled “Mutation-based Fault Localization of Deep Neural Networks.” ASE conference is a top-tier venue for research on techniques for automating software engineering practices such as software bug detection and localization.

In the realm of academia, the most profound indicator of our success lies in the caliber of students we mentor and prepare for the future. This year, it has been my privilege to collaborate closely with two exceptional individuals, guiding them to the successful completion of their doctoral and postdoctoral training programs.

My students and I have continued to make progress on exploring decomposing of neural networks into modules. Starting with our pioneering work on this topic that appeared at ESEC/FSE 2020 and subsequent work that showed the virtue of and methods for decomposing Convolutional Neural Networks at ICSE 2022, we have expanded our results to Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs). During our recent research project, titled “Decomposing a Recurrent Neural Network into Modules for Enabling Reusability and Replacement,” my students and I introduced a groundbreaking method for reengineering recurrent neural networks (RNNs).Our findings, which my PhD student Sayem Imtiaz presented at the 45th International Conference on Software Engineering, highlight a novel technique to decompose RNNs into reusable and replaceable components, eliminating the need for retraining the entire model in some cases.

SIGPLAN perspectives has published our essay that provides a perspective on Hybrid SPLASH 2021 conference. SPLASH 2021 was the first hybrid conference at this scale, and one of the first ACM conferences after pandemic. This perspective is authored by Jonathan Aldrich, Sumon Biswas, Steve Blackburn, Benjamin Chung, Youyou Cong, Alex Potanin, Hridesh Rajan, and Talia Ringer. The authors jointly served as hybridization co-chairs of SPLASH 2021, except Rajan who was the general chair of the SPLASH 2021 conference.

I am celebrating the graduation of Sumon Biswas, Rangeet Pan and Iris Ma. Sumon and Rangeet were PhD students in my lab, and Iris was an undergraduate research assistant. After graduation Sumon Biswas will start a postdoctoral position at Carnegie Mellon University, Rangeet Pan will start as a researcher at IBM TJ Watson Research Center, and Iris Ma will start her PhD program at the University of California, Irvine.

In this paper, we propose an approach to decompose a convolutional neural network (CNN) model used for image classification into modules, in which each module can classify a single output class. Furthermore, these modules can be reused or replaced in different scenarios. Also, we evaluate our approach against the 𝐶𝑂2𝑒 consumption of models created from scratch and reusing or replacing decomposed modules.

This work attempts to inform the art and practice of designing data science (DS) pipeline. Our investigation suggest that DS pipeline is a well used software architecture but often built in an ad hoc manner. We demonstrated the importance of standardization and analysis framework for DS pipeline following the traditional software engineering research on software architecture and design patterns. We contributed three representations of DS pipelines that capture the essence of our subjects in theory, in-the-small, and in-the-large that would facilitate building new DS pipelines.

Sumon Biswas has successfully defended his MS thesis entitled “Understanding Unfairness and its Mitigation in Open-Source Machine Learning Models”. The abstract of the thesis is as follows:

This work proposed a causal method to measure fairness of components in machine learning pipeline. Specifically, it evaluates many preprocessing stages in the pipeline and shows that those stages can be root cause of societal bias.

SPLASH 2020, the ACM SIGPLAN conference on Systems, Programming, Languages, and Applications: Software for Humanity, starts on November 15, 2020 at 0700 Central Standard Time. The 2020 edition is a virtual conference. Registration is very affordable and the conference will be mirrored for 12 hours to be globally accessible.

This Fall 2020 semester, I am teaching an advanced topics seminar on the idea of Modularity in Software Engineering. The goal of this seminar is to discuss some classic and recent papers on modularity in software engineering and programming languages.

PhD student Rangeet Pan and Hridesh Rajan have received an ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at the ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE) 2020 for their work “On Decomposing a Deep Neural Network into Modules”. So far deep neural networks, the machine learning models used for deep learning, are thought of as monolithic machine learning models. This work shows for the first time that it is possible to decompose a deep neural network into parts so that these parts can be reused to create another deep neural network and replaced to improve the machine learning model.

Distinguished papers are given to at most 10% of the papers accepted at an ACM sponsored conference. ESEC/FSE is an internationally renowned forum for researchers, practitioners, and educators to present and discuss the most recent innovations, trends, experiences, and challenges in the field of software engineering. Along with the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), it is widely recognized as the top-2 conferences in software engineering. ESEC/FSE brings together experts from academia and industry to exchange the latest research results and trends as well as their practical application in all areas of software engineering.

The EAPLS Best Paper Award 2020 is awarded to the paper “An Empirical Study on the Use and Misuse of Java 8 Streams”, by Raffi Khatchadourian, Yiming Tang, Mehdi Bagherzadeh (Ph.D. ‘16 computer science) and Baishakhi Ray.

Md Johirul Islam has successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled “Towards Understanding the Challenges Faced by Machine Learning Software Developers and Enabling Automated Solutions”. The abstract of the thesis is as follows:

This work presents takes the first step toward decomposing a monolithic deep neural network (DNN) into modules so that components of the deep neural network can be reused to create another network. The approach also takes the first step towards enabling replacement of features/concerns within the DNN.

This work presents a comprehensive study of machine learning models to understand whether they exhibit bias.

As researchers and public-health experts join forces to battle COVID-19, computer scientists from Iowa State University have developed a data science infrastructure that will drastically improve research efficiencies for scientists who study the novel coronavirus.

This work proposes bespoke control flow analysis (bcfa), a novel source code analysis technique for performing large scale source code analysis over the control flow graphs.

This work presents a comprehensive study of bug repair patterns for five DNN libraries

Samantha-Syed Khairunnesa has successfully passed the PhD preliminary exam. The proposal abstract:

Md Johirul Islam has successfully defended his Masters of Science thesis. Johirul’s work has focused on creating a shared data science infrastructure for transportation data.

Hamid Bagheri has successfully passed the PhD preliminary exam. Hamid’s PhD work will continue his MS work on a shared data science infrastructure for genomics data extending it to the non-redundant (NR) database and using the infrastructure to enable new questions in data-driven genomics.

Hamid Bagheri has successfully defended his Masters of Science degree. Hamid’s MS work has focused on creating a shared data science infrastructure for Genomics data.

The J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board had selected Prof. Rajan for the 2018-19 U.S. Scholar Award. This award led to an international workshop on large-scale empirical research on software security.

The J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board has selected Prof. Rajan for the 2018-19 U.S. Scholar Award.

Early registration is now open for the 2018 Midwest Big Data Summer School to be held from May 14-17, 2018 in Ames, Iowa on Iowa State University campus. More details, including the link to register, can be found here.

Our lab has had two papers selected to appear at the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering to be held at Gothenberg, Sweden from May 27-June 3, 2018.

Ganesha Upadhyaya, a graduate student in the Dept. of Computer Science and a member of the Laboratory for Software Design successfully defended his PhD thesis today. His thesis title was ``Collective Program Analysis.’’ More details about his thesis are available here.

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has recognized Dr. Hridesh Rajan as one of 43 distinguished member for 2017.

The 2017 Midwest Big Data Summer School held from July 10-14, 2017 in Ames, Iowa on Iowa State University campus was another successful edition.

Dr. Zhen Yu has joined the Laboratory for Software Design as a Postdoctoral Fellow. Dr. Yu who prefers to go by Zhen obtained his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Harbin Institute of Technology where he was supervised by Prof. Xiaohong Su. Prior to joining the Laboratory for Software Design, Dr. Yu conducted research at the National Institute of Informatics in Tokyo, Japan.

Just received words from the Iowa State University Office of the Senior Vice President and Provost that the Data Science Minor and Data Science Certificate are approved.

Early registration is now open for the 2017 Midwest Big Data Summer School to be held from July 10-14, 2017 in Ames, Iowa on Iowa State University campus. More details, including the link to register, can be found here.

Prof. Hridesh Rajan, professor in the Department of Computer Science, was named Kingland Professor of Data Analytics.

Nitin Tiwari, a graduate student in the computer science and a member of the Laboratory for Software Design successfully defended his Masters thesis today. His thesis title was ``The design and implementation of Candoia: A platform for building and sharing mining software repositories tools as apps.’’ More details about his thesis are available here.

A paper on the Candoia Platform and Ecosystem has been accepted at the 14th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2017), a conference co-located with ICSE 2017 at Buenos Aires, Argentina, 20-21 May, 2017. Main goal of the platform is to bridge the gap between research and practice thereby easing the process of transitioning software engineering research results to industry.

The Laboratory for Software Design in the Department of Computer Science at Iowa State University is seeking a graduate student to work on the Panini project. The Panini project is developing programming languages and tools for improving modular reasoning about concurrent programs. For more details about the project please refer to http://paninij.org. The initial position is for one year with the possibility of extensions up to three years. A qualified candidate is: (1) enrolled in the Ph.D. program in Computer Science or Computer Engineering or a closely related field, and (2) outstanding ability to carry out research. Candidates who are applying to the Ph.D. program will also be considered.

The Laboratory for Software Design in the Department of Computer Science at Iowa State University is seeking a postdoctoral fellow to work on the Boa project. The Boa project is developing an infrastructure for big code mining and using the infrastructure for such software engineering goals as specification inference. For more details about the project please refer to https://boa.cs.iastate.edu. The initial position is for one year with the possibility of extensions up to three years. A qualified candidate has: (1) a Ph.D. in Computer Science, Software Engineering or a closely related field, and (2) outstanding ability to carry out research. Candidates who are in the final stages of obtaining their Ph.D. will also be considered.

We just heard that our work on first class effect will appear at the OOPSLA/SPLASH 2016 conference. This is a collaborative effort with my former PhD student Yuheng Long and Yu David Liu. This work asks: what if software could inspect its side-effects to make runtime decisions?”

For the last several years, my research lab has been developing the Panini programming language whose goals are to make concurrent programming easier and concurrent programs free of concurrency related defects.

I will be teaching a course on object-oriented analysis and design this Fall at Iowa State University after a long hiatus. I last taught that course in Fall 2007.

Good evening! Its Monday, July 25, 2016 and I just got a basic blog up and running. I am using the Jekyll page generator. Thanks to Barry Clark and others for putting together the Jekyll Now repository that makes the entire process a piece of cake.

My (now former) PhD Student Mehdi Bagherzadeh just defended his PhD Thesis. Congratulations to Mehdi!

Myself and Pavan Aduri wrote to the Midwest Big Data Hub to seek support for organizing the Inaugural Midwest Big Data Summer School in June 2016. Just heard that proposal was accepted, although with a significant reduction in budget.